Almost exactly one year after a high-profile crash on San Francisco's Market Street in which an automated Cruise vehicle dragged a woman for 20 feet before stopping, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has issued a fine and a consent order to the GM-backed company.

Specifically, as they explain in a Monday release, the NHTSA is dinging GM and Cruise over failing to disclose post-crash details about the injured pedestrian in two of its reports to the agency. The NHTSA says it "discovered Cruise had omitted details from its crash reports after viewing video it requested from Cruise of the Oct. 2 incident."

"It is vitally important for companies developing automated driving systems to prioritize safety and transparency from the start," says NHTSA Deputy Administrator Sophie Shulman in a statement. "NHTSA is using its enforcement authority to ensure operators and manufacturers comply with all legal obligations and work to protect all road users."

As a result of the NHTSA action, Cruise has consented to a total monetary penalty of $1.5 million, and the company will be "required to submit to NHTSA a corrective action plan" about complying with the agency's general standing order around autonomous vehicles. There are additional reporting requirements for Cruise for the next two years involving documented traffic violations, and all software updates.

This follows an even lesser fine of $112,500 that was issued earlier this year by the California Public Utilities Commission over this same incident. The woman who was severely injured in the crash also received a settlement from GM that was said to be between $8 million and $12 million.

The October 2, 2023 crash, which occurred at Fifth and Market streets, involved multiple vehicles and a jaywalking pedestrian who was reportedly knocked by another vehicle into the path of the Cruise taxi. In its effort to downplay the Cruise vehicle's role in the crash, Cruise has incurre most of the wrath of regulator over lack of transparency — though the incident also called to question whether the autonomous car was programmed to properly deal with an emergency involving a prone pedestrian underneath it.

Cruise subsequently saw its operating permit suspended by the California DMV, the company's CEO resigned, they had a round of layoffs, and they recalled their vehicles.

In December 2023, the California Public Utilities Commission publicly accused the company of misleading the public and withholding information from the crash.

Cruise has since been edging back into the Bay Area, little by little, and we learned in September that they were back out testing vehicles, with humans in the driver seat, in Sunnyvale and Mountain View — for mapping purposes only. The company already did a lot of that mapping work in San Francisco, and they probably want to start taking fare-paying passengers here in the city again at some point.

Meanwhile, reporting to the NHTSA shows us that there have been plenty of traffic incidents involving self-driving vehicles — mostly in California, and mostly Waymos — in the last 12 months, with individual incidents going up in May. That coincides with Waymo expanding its service across San Francisco and down in Los Angeles. Only a handful of crashes — and they could have involved other companies, we can't tell from the chart — resulted in serious injuries, and the vast majority in the last 12 months, 641 out of 760, resulted in no injuries at all.

The overwhelming majority of these incidents, clearly, have not risen to the level of newsworthiness.